May 2, 2000
2:44 p.m.
Paul Prescod writes:
The fact that my proposal has the same effect as making Latin-1 the "default encoding" is a near-term side effect of the definition of Unicode. My long term proposal is to do away with the concept of 8-bit strings (and thus, conversions from 8-bit to Unicode) altogether. One string to rule them all! Why must this be a long term proposal?
I would find it quite attractive, when * the old string type became an imutable list of bytes * automatic conversion between byte lists and unicode strings were performed via user customizable conversion functions (a la __import__). Dieter